It's a common question in our workshops, seminars, and coaching programs:

How do you activate the Friendship Trigger with someone you hardly know, or don't even know at all?

And while it's true that deeper, longer-term relationships, those that can benefit from shared experiences, are especially fertile ground for influence and persuasion, the factors that can activate the Friendship Trigger are quite broad and various, and don't always require the level of common ground achieved only through relationship building.

A Business Built on the Friendship Trigger

My first new business venture was one of those early dot-com wild rides. It was New York in the late ‘90s, and for an internet startup that wound up on the cover of PC Magazine, The New York Times, and CNN, the fact that none of us were technologists might have seemed a hindrance. Even a dealbreaker.

In fact, our IT ignorance turned out to be a key factor in our success. Why? Because of the remarkable power of the Friendship Trigger.

Our venture was essentially as a broker for entertainment content from the major motion picture studios and television networks ported to the most popular digital platforms of the day, like CompuServe, AOL, and various website destinations. It isn't well remembered today, but the entertainment companies were remarkably slow on the uptake when it came to what was then called "new media." Few if any resources were deployed in-house at the studios and networks to properly prepare and position their publicity and marketing content to the exploding online audience. Our first big hire was a team to scan printed press kits all day!

We were distinguished by an array of “firsts,” including first live online coverage of the Oscar®, Emmy, and Tony awards; first digital media company invited to the motion picture premiere junkets; and first to upload movie trailers, including exclusive access to Disney animation. Common now, back in the day it was a very big deal. Our posting of the trailer for The Lion King was so groundbreaking and popular it crashed servers all over the world.

But why us?

Why us rather than the dozens of other firms (including major players like Microsoft) that had sought to engage the entertainment industry to traffic their wildly popular marketing content?

In fact, the folks at the studios and networks told us why: precisely because we were not technologists.

Turns out that everyone who had come before us to sell them on digital media seemed and sounded like they were from another planet. (It's useful to remember that, prior to social media, online channels were thought of as being mainly for computer geeks, science nerds, and social misfits.)

We didn’t speak geek. All of us had come out of burgeoning careers in media and entertainment, where we spoke the same language as those in the show biz marketing departments. We understood their concerns, risks, rewards and, importantly, we didn’t intimidate them with technobabble.

Reading a draft of Dad’s book years later, I was finally able to put a name to the phenomenon that made us the most persuasive choice in an early competitive bid for the entertainment industry’s digital business: the Friendship Trigger

It wasn't about close personal relationships, but about the favorable degree of sameness and similarity we had with our prospects, perhaps especially as contrasted with those they had encountered before.

That's what made us the preferred choice to help move them into an exciting and risky new category.

We weren’t any more qualified than anyone else (arguably less qualified, from some angles), and we certainly had no conscious idea of triggers or the tools of persuasion. It was all luck and timing.

The good news is that you can reduce dependence on luck and timing by using tools of persuasion which only became available since the advent of live brain imaging around the turn of the century. The surprising discoveries of this technology revealed to neuroscience the disproportionate impact of the emotional brain on human decision-making, and proved the effectiveness of emotional triggers for more persuasive communication.